Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, reported on the CDC data failings a year ago with nothing changing. In other words, the CDC has been using faulty data all along. Even CNN is finally admitting it. A CNN article headlined, The US still isn’t getting Covid-19 date right, quotes Freeman and summarizes some of the egregious data collection errors.
“It’s difficult not just during pandemic times, but even more difficult during the pandemic,” Freeman said. “Our data modernization infrastructure for governmental public health is just really nonexistent. So when you think about having to pivot quickly with new metrics and how that data gets collected and reported and accumulated, aggregated, de-aggregated, it can be daunting.”
The data failings of America’s public health system are many and varied, tainting nearly every decision-driving metric in one way or another, CNN reported.
“Lack of accurate, real-time information was one of the greatest failures of the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March 2021.
Nothing has changed a year later.
THE NEW TOOL IS AN OLD TOOL
On Wednesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky touted new tools, including wastewater surveillance, that reflect the agency’s “huge strides” in the ability to effectively monitor Covid-19.
“As we all look forward to this next step, I want to instill in everyone that moving forward from this pandemic will be a process that’s led by our surveillance and our data,” Walensky said. “I’m confident that CDC and our public health partners are well-positioned to lead the way.”
Watch:
That’s a ridiculous statement since we’ve been testing wastewater for eons and that’s how we knew Omicron was in the US prior to its discovery in South Africa.
THE GREAT PIVOT
The media and the CDC now have to pivot and end this mess while trying to save face. The pandemic is over and Omicron is the decider. It’s mild and getting milder. Watch:
CNN is even reporting some problems that render CDC ineffective in pandemics [yet they rule over us as medical tyrants, based on what?]:
Inconsistencies
For example, some states count new Covid-19 cases by person, while others report new cases based on the total number of positive tests, regardless how many times one person may have tested positive.
Some states report only PCR tests, while others include positive antigen tests, too.
Covid-19 hospitalization data, often viewed as one of the most stable metrics, has also come under scrutiny recently. There are questions raised about how to differentiate between patients who are specifically admitted for treatment of Covid-19 and those who test positive incidentally while being treated for something else.
Poor Data Reporting
Data reporting systems used in health care are also broadly outdated and time-consuming. It puts decision-makers behind in a time when speed is of the essence.
Experts more generally bemoan the lack of integrated records systems.
The surveillance worksheet that the CDC provides for health departments to report Covid-19 cases spans six pages. It has more than 300 fields for data entry.
The Sentinel started reporting on bad data in May, 2020. They knew data was faulty but ruled over us as unelected officials any way. Watch:
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